Effects of Leaf coverage on insect abundance of adult trees and saplings

This lab was done on Wednesday 14th and 21st October 2015 at Danby woodlot located at York University. The class was divided into groups of 4 or 5. My group members are Jordan Deosamy, Mandy Huynh and Dylan Stoll. 50 adult trees and saplings were chosen at random and the insect abundance and leaf litter coverage were determined. The group split into groups of two to make the sampling faster. Each group sampled 50 different areas in the woodlot. Each group had a 1m by 1m quadrat and an orange flagging tape. When a random adult tree or sapling was chosen to be sampled, it was first tied with an orange flagging tape to prevent repetition and to differentiate from other groups that were doing their own experiments. Determining the life stage of the tree was done by visual observation. Adult trees were considered to be 2m or taller. The 1m by 1m quadrat was then placed right beside the adult tree or sapling facing the north because there was more shade meaning the ground would have more moisture and there would be more insect abundance. After that, the insect abundance was determined by visual observation for 3 minutes and counting the amount of insects that could be seen within the quadrat. Finally, pushing the leaf litter in the quadrat to one corner and spreading it out to see how much of the quadrat space it covered estimated the leaf litter coverage. The result was recorded in percentage. This was done for all the trials. The purpose of this experiment was to find if leaf coverage and proximity of adult tree has any effect on insect abundance. The environmental condition on the first day that the first 50 data was collected was partly cloudy, the temperature was 12 °C, slight breeze and the ground was mainly dry. On the second day the temperature was 9 °C, it was windy enough to move small branches, there was more leaf litter on the ground and more moisture due to rain the previous day. On the 14th the lab lasted from 2:55pm to 4:45pm while on the 21st the lab lasted from 3:05pm to 4:45pm.